Value and Worthlessness : The Rise of the Populist Right and Other Disruptions in the Anthropology of Capitalism / Don Kalb.

Intro -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface: Hidden History and the Anthropologist -- Acknowledgments -- Part I - Foundations -- Introduction - Webs of Life versus Webs of Meaning: Or How I Became a Marxist Anthropologist -- Chapter 1 - No Outside? Then What? For a Dialectical Value Regime -- Part II - Living Labor, Value, and Worthlessness -- Chapter 2 - "Worthless Poles" and Other Postsocialist Devaluations: Conversations with a Polish Populist -- Chapter 3 - "It is My History, and It is Worthless": Gender and the Making of Philipsism, the Netherlands -- Chapter 4 - Regimes of Value and Worthlessness: Two Stories and a Marxian Reflection -- Part III - The Non-Surprise of the Populist Right -- Chapter 5 - Theory from the East: Class without Class and the Making of the Illiberal Right in Eastern Europe -- Chapter 6 - Double Deviations: The Making of the Populist Right in the Global North -- Part IV - Global Middle-Classness: Living and Dreaming -- Chapter 7- "Scraps from the Bourgeois Kitchen": In the Romanian Bubble of Outsourced Creativity -- Chapter 8 - The "Global Middle Class": A Seductive Empty Signifier -- Part V - Finance and Hegemonic Decline -- Chapter 9 - Financialization and the Capitalist Moment: Marx versus Weber in the Anthropology of Global Systems -- Chapter 10 - Two Theories of Money: A Historical Anthropology of the State-Finance Nexus for Present Purposes -- Part VI - Polemics for a Reason -- Chapter 11 - Trotsky over Mauss: Anthropological Theory and the Centennial of the Russian Revolution -- Chapter 12 - The Labor Theory of Value and the Value Theory of Labor -- Epilogue: Why I Will Not Make It as a Moral Anthropologist -- Index -- Blank Page.

Advocating for an interdisciplinary Marxist anthropology of the present, this book uses historical and global anthropology to engage with history, theory, unevenness, and comparison, while using "global ethnography" and "hidden histories" as the keys to social discovery. Kalb's anthropology of value and worthlessness lays bare the logics that currently produce right wing, populist, and nationalist outcomes. The book also battles with the "anthropology of global systems", financialization, and the seductive myths of global middle-class formation, while assessing the theoretical legacies of Eric Wolf, David Graeber, David Harvey, Jonathan Friedman, Marcel Mauss and "moral anthropology", among others

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2025. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.